Blizzard is in further hot water over its recently released hack-and-slash role-playing game Diablo III, after numerous reports of hacked accounts and stolen in-game money.

Blizzard is in further hot water over its recently released hack-and-slash role-playing game Diablo III, after numerous reports of hacked accounts and stolen in-game money.

Eurogamer states that one of its writers, Christian Donlan, was the victim of a hacked account over the weekend, but reports are rolling in that this is not an isolated problem.

A growing number of players are finding their accounts have been hijacked, their inventories cleaned out, and their gold stolen. Having an authenticator may not protect from these attacks either, with some claims that hackers are bypassing the authentication server.

Blizzard will roll back affected characters to restore them, their items and gold, but some progress may be lost in the process.

This situation only exacerbates a series of problems that players have encountered with the game, particularly the dreaded Error #33, which prevents gamers from playing. This problem arose again on Sunday on European servers, but rumours are circulating that the servers were taken offline to deal with an SQL injection attack.

This slate of issues raises significant questions about whether or not Blizzard did the right thing to force users onto servers to play the game, which opens a whole host of security issues, not to mention the simple problems of server uptime and internet connectivity, which does little to entice those who only want to enjoy the single-player experience.

Blizzard recently apologised for its insufficient preparations for the launch day rush. It also decided to delay the introduction of the real-money auction house, which was probably a wise decision now that hacked accounts are a concern. The cynical among us might even wonder if this was the reason Blizzard delayed its release in the first place.